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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27959099">gilgamesh</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dolorife/pseuds/dolorife'>dolorife</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Epic of Gilgamesh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Terminal Illnesses, short and bittersweet, the inherent homoeroticism between gilgamesh &amp; enkidu</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:56:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,791</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27959099</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dolorife/pseuds/dolorife</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gilgamesh dreaded his visits to Enkidu. Not because he didn't love Enkidu, but because he loved him <i>so much</i> and to be continually confronted with the possibility of a future without him was devastating. Yet, to not go, to not visit, would mean living without him, in a world of loneliness, that much sooner....</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Enkidu &amp; Gilgamesh (Mesopotamian Mythology)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>gilgamesh</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>i asked the tumblr void if anyone wanted to read this and there was a surprising amount of people who said yes (and by surprising amount i mean, like, nine), so here it is.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Gilgamesh rapped his knuckles against the doorjamb of Enkidu’s room, one foot over the threshold while the other lingers behind, unable to make that final step on its own. When Enkidu first entered palliative care, and was still unpacking his books and soft clothes into his new room, he used to tell Gilgamesh that there was no need to knock when the door was open—and Gilgamesh in particular was always welcome, open door or not. Still, despite Enkidu’s insistence, Gilgamesh could never bring himself to treat this place with that kind of comfortable familiarity.</p>
<p>“Come in,” Enkidu said.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh forced himself forward. Enkidu was still in bed, under thick blankets that looked like a mound of furs piled up on top of each other. It gave the illusion of fullness, but Gilgamesh had seen Enkidu bare of their bulk. He knew how stripped of meat Enkidu’s frame had become.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh sank into the armchair at Enkidu’s bedside.</p>
<p>“How are you feeling?” asked Gilgamesh.</p>
<p>Enkidu smiled. “It’s a good day.”</p>
<p>It was meant to be comforting, but the truth of that statement combined with Enkidu’s wan, tired face spread a dark pall over Gilgamesh’s features. Gilgamesh reached out and took one of Enkidu’s hands in both of his, turning it over and over, worrying at how thin the skin on the back of it had become, like rice paper ready to be taken away by the wind.</p>
<p>“Hey,” Enkidu said. “It’s a <em>good </em>day.”</p>
<p>“Tell me about it?”</p>
<p>Enkidu did so, and Gilgamesh felt as if he could mouth the words along with him. Enkidu’s body had grown so weak by then that he was mostly confined to bedrest, shrinking his already dwindled world smaller. There were no new stories for Enkidu to tell.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh listened to Enkidu speak about Nurse Charlotte, who favoured Enkidu over the other patients, who would wheel him out into the gardens and sit with him, and who would read him passages from whatever new book he was reading on dreary days when his eyes grew tired. Gilgamesh listened to Enkidu speak about the therapy dog who made rounds that morning, a young one, must be new, with golden fur and big brown eyes. Gilgamesh listened, but his mind was elsewhere.</p>
<p>“What’s wrong?” Enkidu asked, always in tune with Gilgamesh’s thoughts.</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” Gilgamesh said. “Nothing new, not really.”</p>
<p>“You’re upset, though.”</p>
<p>How could Gilgamesh put his thoughts – his feelings – into words? He didn’t know how, and told Enkidu so.</p>
<p>“Just try,” Enkidu said. “I will be your interpreter.”</p>
<p>They smiled at one another, both thinking of the game they used to play where Gilgamesh would recount to Enkidu one of his outlandish dreams and Enkidu would interpret them, spinning them into prophesy. Somehow, he would turn them even more outlandish. Buoyed, Gilgamesh decided to try. If anyone could understand Gilgamesh, it would be Enkidu.</p>
<p>The problem with articulating his feelings was that they had been with him for so long that they had made a home in his being; he didn’t know where they began, and they certainly hadn’t ended. They were a weight he no longer registered, a hook in his mind that wouldn’t come loose, a cold touch to his spine that held him still.</p>
<p>He felt like there was something he should have, that he was owed, and yet was being withheld. He felt alone when he walked down the street and no one marked his passing. He felt unseen when he tried, once, going to church and left in the middle of a sermon he heard with deadened ears, sure that whatever gods that were meant to be his had long since abandoned him.</p>
<p>He felt like he was losing a battle.</p>
<p>“I just feel as if I should be more than I am,” Gilgamesh said. Then, dissatisfied, he revised, “Or that the world is less than it should be.”</p>
<p>“You are feeling small, maybe helpless and insignificant, because the world isn’t measuring up to your expectations,” Enkidu surmised.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh gripped Enkidu’s hand tighter and laughed in delight. No matter how many times Enkidu would show the insight he had into Gilgamesh’s psyche – insight that not even Gilgamesh had – it would always surprise him. The only other person who has known Gilgamesh so thoroughly was his mother, long gone. Gilgamesh dreaded the day that loomed, ever larger, when there would be no one left in the world who knew him.</p>
<p>“Do you remember the first dream I ever told you?” Gilgamesh asked.</p>
<p>“Of course,” Enkidu said. “It was of me, walking at your side on a road without an end. It was a dream you had before we met.”</p>
<p>“I dreamed of you before I even saw your face,” said Gilgamesh, sounding a little dreamy himself. “Like destiny. Don’t you ever feel as if we were <em>meant</em> to find each other? To be together, always?”</p>
<p>Enkidu looked reminiscent. “The way you describe it . . . I’m always reminded of the Greek myth where humans were once made up of four arms, four legs, and two heads. Then, one day, the gods decided we were too powerful and split us in two, left to search for the other half of ourselves to be whole. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>“Yes, exactly,” said Gilgamesh, his mouth moving before his mind, because Enkidu always knew these things. Yet, the second after he agreed, he became uncertain. <em>Greek?</em> he thought, lips downturned. The idea of being the splitting of a whole instead of two separate wholes, one made for the other, was wrong. Somehow, it wasn’t what Gilgamesh had meant at all.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh let Enkidu’s hand slip through his own.</p>
<p>He had expected Enkidu to interpret his words with ease and accuracy, but instead he found that there was a distance stretching between the two of them that Gilgamesh hadn’t known existed until then.</p>
<p>“We’re lucky to have had each other for as long as we have,” said Enkidu, shocking Gilgamesh with his use of past tense.</p>
<p>Harshly, Gilgamesh said, “You’re not dead.”</p>
<p>“Gilgamesh.”</p>
<p>“You’re <em>not</em>.”</p>
<p>“Not yet,” Enkidu allowed, perhaps intending it to be conciliatory, but all it did was make rising dread in Gilgamesh’s gut, there since Enkidu’s diagnosis, threaten to flood.</p>
<p>“How are you so calm in the face of this?” Gilgamesh demanded. “How are you not angry?” Gilgamesh himself could hardly remember a time when he wasn’t angry—or scared.</p>
<p>Enkidu sighed heavily. “I’m too tired to be angry anymore, Gilgamesh. I’ve been living with a death sentence over my head, like a sword poised to strike, for years. I have fought until I no longer could, and then I stewed in my anger until it dried to nothing. You remember how I was when I was first diagnosed. I was a terror, cursing out everyone near me. It didn’t matter who—nurses, doctors, friends. Even God.”</p>
<p>“You never cursed me.”</p>
<p>“Of course not,” said Enkidu. “You are my greatest friend, my other half. I would spend however many waking hours I have remaining in your company, if I had my way.”</p>
<p>“Stop it!” Gilgamesh cried, turning away from him sharply. “It’s as if you’re resigned to your own death.”</p>
<p>“That’s because I <em>am </em>resigned, though I comfort myself by calling it acceptance. It’s been a long time since I was healthy, Gilgamesh,” Enkidu said quietly.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh did not want to look at him, already knowing what he would see. He looked anyway, and found his eyes unwillingly drawn to Enkidu’s head. The hair loss had begun in clumps. There had been no lead-up to the hair loss; it had not been gradual, first strands, then fistfuls. Enkidu, foreseeing his long hair being reduced to patches, had not allowed the chemo to take it away from him. Instead, he had shaved it off himself between one day and the next, and Gilgamesh cried the first time he saw him.</p>
<p>Even now, chemo halted months ago, Enkidu’s hair refused to return to what it once was. Enkidu kept the dry, brittle strands buzzed close to his scalp. A thinned-out forest, where once there were trees in abundance.</p>
<p>“You know,” Enkidu began slowly, “ever since my diagnosis, I’ve had dreams too. Or, I’ve had one recurring dream. Every time I shut my eyes and let my mind drift away, I taste my final supper of dust and clay. I feel the numb horror as my flesh serves meals to worms and maggots. I cannot move or scream; the darkness is too tightly packed around me. I cannot do anything, because I’m dead. This is my eternity, and I know it.</p>
<p>“And then I wake up.”</p>
<p>Gilgamesh had listened to Enkidu’s account with a hand pressed firmly to his mouth, the only thing holding his distressed cries inside. His eyes had slid shut of their own volition, and in his mind’s eye he was transported by Enkidu’s words until it was as if Enkidu’s dreams became his own. At Enkidu’s final words, however, Gilgamesh opened his eyes once more. He lowered his hand. </p>
<p>“You . . . wake up?” Gilgamesh said. “And then what?”</p>
<p>“Well, it isn’t so dark once I open my eyes,” Enkidu said. “My dream hasn’t caught up to me – not yet – and I find that I don’t want to give what few waking hours I have left to death, especially the ones I spend with you. Do you understand?”</p>
<p>Gilgamesh bowed his head briefly, his hair (grown long, at Enkidu’s insistence, instead of shaved off in solidarity) falling down in a curtain to hide his face.</p>
<p>“I understand,” he said. He would no more talk of death, of the anxieties that grow within his own shadow, inescapable, the closer they got to the unknown.</p>
<p>“Good,” Enkidu said with a sigh, sinking deeper into the pillows propping him up. “I’m tired, Gilgamesh.”</p>
<p>“Close your eyes and rest,” Gilgamesh said immediately. “Visiting hours are nearly over anyway; I’ll get out of your hair.” He winced, but both he and Enkidu pretended he didn’t.</p>
<p>“Will you stay with me until I fall asleep?”</p>
<p>“Of course.”</p>
<p>“Thank you.” Enkidu closed his eyes.</p>
<p>Gilgamesh stared out the window that overlooked a wide stretch of green grass and shrubbery, as well as one lone cedar tree. The sun had hardly begun to set, but Gilgamesh felt as if he was already surrounded by a darkness so thick it blotted out even the hope of light’s renewal. His eyes and his heart could see nothing—nothing ahead of him and nothing behind. It was like a waking dream, an aching glimpse into his future, and it was one he could interpret without aid. Gilgamesh knew, staring into that nothingness, that he was looking at his life without Enkidu in it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>
  <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/blog/dolorife">my tumblr</a>
</p></blockquote></div></div>
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